DiveRecorder
a powerful, flexible and user-friendly solution for diving recorders
Equipment 'case' study - Eindhoven
At the end of 2014 the technical team of the Eindhoven Diving Club successfully launched their new Meet IT equipment. While their solution may not be suitable for many other DiveRecorder users, they see several improvements on their previous kit when considering their requirements. Each year the club hosts many Meets involving simultaneous events.
The Old Kit
Previously, they used desktop computers with flat panel monitors on the poolside tables instead of the more commonly used laptops. When running simultaneous events, they would set up 4 computers on each side of the pool to run DiveRecorder, TickerTape, a NumberBoard and a ScoreBoard or DR2Ref for the Referee. In addition they would usually have a few more laptops in the Diving Information Centre for background data entry, a server, a connection to the Internet, etc. This meant the set-up and tear-down was laborious and involved the transport of a lot of individual items of hardware. In addition there could be computers to drive plasma displays in the tribune for spectators when the main scoreboard was obscured by the pool hall dividing screen.
The New Kit
The first of two significant developments has been to replace the desktop units with HP t510 Thin Line Client PCs running Windows 7 embedded (be sure to specify Windows!). These devices have no moving parts so are robust when it comes to transportation and the solid state drives are responsive. There are some other advantages which may be of interest to the technically minded who can follow the above link for more details.
The second development has been to fit out three flight cases, each containing four t510 computers and an 8-port switch with most of the wiring permanently installed. The t510 computers will run in the flight cases with the lids closed. This development greatly simplifies the set-up and tear-down and they report that it has reduced these times from 4 hours down to 30 minutes for three persons. To set up (reverse to tear-down):
- place a flight case beside a recording table and open it
- remove the keyboards and mice, and place them on the tables
- uncoil the cable looms and connect them to the appropriate external harware
- connect the Meet network to the switch built into the flight case
- connect JPad base station
- connect power to the flight case power input
- boot the t510 computers
One flight case services the 1m side secretariat, another the 3m side secretariat and the final one the Diving Information Centre.
Illustrations
Click an image to expand it, then simply close the pop-up window to return here.
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If you are interested in finding out more about this project, drop me an email and I will put you in touch with someone from the club.